With big rallies cancelled, young climate activists are adapting election tactics

Phone banks, social media and friend-to-friend campaigning are the new focus ahead of this year’s US elections
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Protesters chant during a youth climate strike in California in December 2019. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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Lauren Aratani

Published on Mon 3 Aug 2020 

For young climate activists in the US, staying home because of the pandemic does not mean staying silent, with plans gathering pace across the country to make their voices heard in November’s elections.

It has been nearly a year since an estimated 6 million people across the world joined the youth-led global climate strikes on 20 September.

In the US, students from Los Angeles to Washington DC skipped school to voice their frustration over the slow response to the climate crisis by elected leaders, and Greta Thunberg told a cheering crowd in New York City “this is only the beginning”.

But in the 10 months since the historic protests, the Covid-19 pandemic has ravaged the US, making meeting and organizing in-person hazardous. Climate strikes, including a major three-day mass protest that was planned for Earth Day 2020 in April, have been cancelled.
Politicians who get elected this cycle have to be the ones that are really caring about our futuresRose Strauss, 20

But networks of youth climate activists have been regrouping, with a new focus on election campaigning with phone banks, social media and friend-to-friend organizing, according to interviews with organizers.

The stakes could not be higher for young people, according to Aracely Jimenez-Hudis, 23, the deputy communications director of the Sunrise Movement, a leading youth advocacy group on the climate.

“We are a generation that was really born into crises,” said Jimenez-Hudis. “We don’t have some golden age that we can look back on and feel that there is any kind of resonance with a call to normalcy because our normal has always been endless wars, has always been police brutality.”

Youth voter turnout during the 2016 elections was disappointing with just 46% of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 going out to vote, compared to 70% of the oldest voters, 70 and over.

Then in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, youth movements began building campaigns and gaining visibility, with climate change growing as a key issue, driven in part by the burgeoning Sunrise Movement, which was founded in 2017.

In preparation for the 2018 midterm elections, the Sunrise Movement began training young activists to canvass for candidates who were proponents of renewable energy and publicly confront incumbents who take money from the fossil fuel industry. When the 2018 midterms came around, 20% more young Americans ages 18 to 29 went out to vote compared to the last midterms in 2014, and Democrats won the House.

The group has more recently been pushing Democratic leaders to embrace the Green New Deal, a bold carbon-neutral plan for the economy championed by progressive Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hold a news conference to introduce Green New Deal legislation in Washington DC. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Backing the policy was initially seen as too radical by many Democrats but it has now been embraced more widely by members of the party. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, recently unveiled a climate and jobs plan that mirrors some of the aggressiveness of the Green New Deal, though some activists believe he is not tough enough on fossil fuel industries.

With the pandemic, Jimenez-Hudis said, the Sunrise Movement has shifted its electoral strategy to focus entirely on phone banking and friend-to-friend organizing – encouraging people to talk to their friends and relatives directly about the candidates they support.

“We still have lots of work to do to make sure that we get the right Democrats on the ballot, the right Green New Deal champions on the ballot for the election in November just up and down the ticket,” Jimenez-Hudis said.

The organization credits its phone banking volunteers for helping Jamaal Bowman, a former teacher who ousted a longtime congressman in New York, win his election and for tightening the race of Charles Booker, a Democrat in Kentucky who was hoping to run against the Republican senator Mitch McConnell.
Aligning racial justice and climate fights

In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in May, the Sunrise Movement has also made efforts to streamline its focus toward racism and police brutality, encouraging members to attend protests and speak out about the intersection of racial justice and climate activism. The organization recently started its #WideAwake campaign, encouraging local activists to protest outside the homes of elected officials. On Juneteenth, a local Sunrise chapter coordinated such a protest outside the home of Senator McConnell, demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed in her home by police in Louisville, Kentucky.

Recent months have helped some young climate activists see that the same systemic changes needed to address climate change are in line with the ones that will bring racial justice, escalating the need for elected officials who will bring those changes.

A man holds a sign at a protest in Brooklyn. Some climate activists believe the changes needed to address climate change are in line with the ones that will bring racial justice. Photograph: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images

Rose Strauss, 20, a former organizer with the Sunrise Movement, said her time with the organization helped her understand the gravity of the 2020 election. She dropped out of college so she could dedicate all her time to the election and canvass for Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire.

Once it became clear that Sanders was not going to win the nomination, Strauss and a few fellow activists began to dedicate their efforts to starting a new initiative called the Down Ballot Disruption Project. The program, held entirely over Zoom, aims to teach young people how to canvass for candidates in their local elections and how to build a community around their activism, especially on social media.

Young people can “change this election in massive ways. The only arena right now, because we can’t go and canvass outside, is social media. That’s where we know how to do stuff,” Strauss said. “We really need to make sure that the politicians who get elected this cycle are going to be the ones that are really caring about our futures.”

For activists with Zero Hour, the climate justice organization that coordinated a youth climate march in Washington DC in summer 2018, the focus for the 2020 election is less on getting individual candidates elected but broadly teaching young activists how to encourage their communities to get out to vote and educate them about the Green New Deal.

The organization, along with the National Children’s Campaign, launched the #Vote4OurFuture campaign in July, targeting youth activists in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Grand Rapids and Detroit in Michigan, two swing states. The campaign was originally scheduled to be a bus tour in March, but coronavirus forced the organizations to change course. Now, the campaign is all about hosting virtual events like roundtables and webinars focusing on what the Green New Deal could look like in specific communities.

“We want climate change to be a top priority on people’s minds when they’re going to the polls in November because of the way it will impact people of color and people living in those cities,” said Zanagee Artis, 20, the co-founder and deputy director of digital advocacy for Zero Hour.


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While climate advocacy during the pandemic has largely been on video chats and social media, young activists are eager to get back on the streets. Fridays for Future, the global organization founded by Greta Thunberg, plans on holding a global climate strike on 25 September. Local chapters are working on what the protest will look like in their areas to accommodate local Covid-19 conditions.

Spencer Berg, 17, an organizer with Fridays for Future NYC, said organizers are still working out the logistics of what the protest will look like, but the overall message of the demonstration will be to advocate for a “green recovery” and ensure that New York City continues to uphold its commitments to fighting climate change.

While the pandemic has left devastation across the city and in many other places in the US, activists are hopeful that coronavirus can provide parallels to climate change and show how a single crisis can affect everyone.

Coronavirus has “inspired a lot of people because it has shown us that the government can act quickly and efficiently to quell a crisis”, Berg said. “That’s what this is: it’s a climate crisis. A lot of politicians say we can’t afford to do that, we don’t have enough time for this, but coronavirus showed us that we can have complete systematic change if we need to.”

As a rabbi, philosopher and physician, Maimonides wrestled with religion and reason – the book he wrote to reconcile them, ‘Guide to the Perplexed,’ has sparked debate ever since

Faith and reason are often treated as opposites. But some philosophers believe they can only strengthen each other, including the Jewish sage Maimonides, who wrote the famous ‘Guide to the Perplexed.’

February 20, 2024
By  Randy L. Friedman

(The Conversation) — I teach a philosophy of religion seminar titled “Faith and Reason.” Most students who register arrive with a mistaken assumption: that the course explores the differences between the two.

“Faith” is often defined as belief in a supernatural God that transcends reason – and belief that science can only go so far to explain the fundamental mysteries of life. Reason, meanwhile, means inquiry that draws on logic and deductive reasoning.

It seems like a stark choice, an either-or – until we read Maimonides. For Maimonides, a 12th century theologian, philosopher, rabbi and physician, there is no true faith without reason.

Maimonides’ full name was Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, and he is often referred to by the abbreviation “Rambam.” His writings spurred centuries of conflict and were even banned in some Jewish communities. Yet he also penned one of the most famous guides to Jewish law and still stands as one of the most influential rabbis to have ever lived.

It is surprising for many students to learn that Maimonides, who lived in present-day Spain, Morocco and Egypt, embraced reason as the only way to make sense of faith. In this rabbi’s view, the idea of a battle between faith and reason sets boundaries where none need exist.

Faith must be grounded in reason, lest it become superstition. This synthesis is at the heart of Maimonides’ most famous philosophical work, “The Guide for the Perplexed.”
Jerusalem and Athens

Treating faith and reason as if they are at odds is nothing new. Some philosophers have described them as two different cities, as when University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss wrote of “Jerusalem and Athens.”

Both cities love wisdom, Strauss wrote, but attribute it to different things. In “Jerusalem,” where life is grounded by faith in God, “the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord,” Strauss wrote in 1967, quoting the biblical books of Proverbs and Job. In “Athens,” on the other hand, symbolized by the ancient Greek philosophers, “the beginning of wisdom is wonder” – the wonder of inquiry and reason.

Almost 800 years before, however, Maimonides was arguing that true religion, true wisdom, requires both.


A statue of Maimonides in Cordoba, Spain.
Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Rambam was deeply steeped in Jewish learning. As a doctor, astronomer and philosopher, however, he was just as knowledgeable about the science of his day. He ostensibly wrote “The Guide to the Perplexed” to help his student Joseph Ibn Aknin navigate between the truths of philosophy, natural science and revelation.

Maimonides’ understanding of God and the universe mostly agreed with Aristotle’s . In Part II of his “Guide,” Maimonides credits Aristotle with helping to prove three key principles about God: God is incorporeal, without a physical body; God is one; and God transcends the material world. Yet God created the world and set it in motion, Maimonides asserts, and everything in it depends on God for its existence.
Science and scripture

Throughout these chapters, the rabbi does not turn to scripture to prove or disprove philosophical propositions, although he notes that Aristotle’s opinion may be “in accordance with the words of our prophets and our theologians or Sages.”

This does not mean that Maimonides does not care about sacred texts – far from it. Rather, he argues that the truths of science and philosophy must inform how people interpret the Bible.

Many people of faith have read the Book of Genesis’ story of creation literally. For them, God’s creation of humanity “in our image and likeness” means both that God must have a body and that humanity shares much in common with God.

For Maimonides, however, language like these passages in Genesis was allegorical. If reason teaches that God is incorporeal, this means that God has no body; God does not physically see, nor do people see God. God does not speak, sit on a throne, stretch out an arm, rest or become angry. Reading these passages literally misunderstands the nature of God.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this claim. In Maimonides’ view, saying that God has a body is not just incorrect but blasphemous and idolatrous. He sees God as unique and transcendent, irreducible to anything human or material. And if God does not literally speak, then the Bible cannot be the literal word of God.

A letter Maimonides wrote around 1172, discovered in the late 1800s.
Culture Club/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Maimonides insists that the Bible be appreciated as an esoteric text. Any part of the revealed text that does not fit with a true understanding of God and the universe must be read allegorically.

Reason does not eliminate his faith in God, or the power of scripture. Instead, reason protects people from believing something incorrect about God’s nature. Maimonides insists that we have faith in reason and that reason ground our faith.

The palace of God

Maimonides’ philosophical writing is filled with debate and disagreement between him, fellow rabbis, Jewish philosophers and the Kalam, a medieval tradition of Islamic theology. Reason was the tool needed to make sense of sacred texts, and philosophical inquiry was the process needed to get it right. The goal was truth, not mere obedience.

Toward the end of his “Guide for the Perplexed,” Maimonides lays out what he believes are different levels of enlightenment. The allegory centers on a king’s palace: Only a select few, those who pursue truest wisdom grounded in philosophy and science, will reach the room where the king – God – resides. People guided by faith alone, who accept scripture literally and unquestioningly, and believe that faith transcends reason, on the other hand, “have their backs turned toward the king’s palace,” moving further and further away from God.

Maimonides is considered one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of all time. And his resolution to the debate between faith and reason could not have been clearer: There should be no true conflict. Both reason and revelation are our guides.

(Randy L. Friedman, Associate Professor of Judaic Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New York. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

RIKERS

Ex-inmates decry worsening state of New York's 'hellhole' jail

Issued on: 19/09/2021 - 03:36Modified: 19/09/2021 - 03:34

Rikers is one of America's highest-profile prisons and has incarcerated celebrities from Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, to rapper Tupac Shakur and former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn

 JOHN MOORE GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File


New York (AFP)

It's held disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, rapper Tupac Shakur and ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn: New York's notorious Rikers Island prison is now under intense scrutiny over the deaths of at least nine inmates this year.

Officials who visited the high-profile jail this week, and former inmates spoken to by AFP, say conditions have worsened dramatically at the sprawling complex due to widespread staff shortages during the pandemic.

"It's the wild, wild West in there," said Johnny Perez, who was in and out of Rikers between 1996 and 2001 on robbery and gun possession charges.

Glenn Martin -- who spent three days in Rikers, where he was stabbed four times in an attack, after a shoplifting arrest as a 16-year-old in the late 1980s -- calls it a "hellhole."

"It's described as a gladiator school for a reason," the 49-year-old told AFP, listing another of Rikers' monikers: "torture island."

Marvin Mayfield, detained for a total of 22 months over two stretches in the 1980s and 2007 for burglary, said Rikers leaves "a stain on the soul of everyone" who goes there.

The jail, which opened in 1932 and also housed John Lennon killer Mark David Chapman and the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious, has long had a reputation for being a hotbed of violence.

Incidents against inmates and guards have in part been blamed on its remote location in the East River between The Bronx and Queens boroughs.

But lawmakers and activists say the situation has spiraled out of control in recent months, with conditions becoming unsafe for both prisoners and officers.

A view of the entrance to Rikers Island penitentiary complex in 2011

 EMMANUEL DUNAND AFP

They say basic sanitary needs are not being met and rates of self-harm are rising.

"What I witnessed was a humanitarian crisis. A horror house of abuse and neglect," said New York State assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, who visited this week.

"There's garbage everywhere, rotting food with maggots, cockroaches, worms in the showers, human feces and piss," Gallagher tweeted, adding that broken limbs were not being treated.

New York City's department of corrections (DOC) says nine people have died at Rikers this year, up from seven last year and three in 2019. Local media has reported 10 deaths in 2021, at least five from suicide.

The DOC has been struggling with staffing for months; posts have been unattended with inmates left to fend for themselves.

- Closure plans -

Some 2,700 guards -- almost a third of the city's entire prison force -- are currently not working, some because of coronavirus which spread through US jails.

Prison officers unions say guards are overworked from triple shifts while others are recovering from the effects of Covid-19 and injuries inflicted by inmates.

They add that many are forced to stay away because conditions have become too dangerous, but officials say some are abusing an unlimited sick leave policy.

Mayor Bill de Blasio launched an emergency relief plan for Rikers this week, boosting staffing and implementing 30-day suspensions for officers who go AWOL.

Dominique Strauss Kahn, former Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after being released on bail in New York City in 2011 before sexual assault charges against him were dropped MICHAEL NAGLE GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP

The proposal included emergency contracting to repair broken doors and clean facilities.

On Friday, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the immediate release of 191 inmates to help temper what she called a "volatile" situation.

The number of inmates at Rikers has fallen from around 20,000 in the 1990s to almost 6,000 today.

The vast majority are awaiting trial. They are also overwhelmingly from Black and Hispanic communities.

Perez has made return visits for advocacy work and says the jail has not improved since his release.

"It's ten times as worse," he told AFP.

In June, the DOC launched initiatives to increase staffing and safety and says it is making "every effort" to improve conditions.

Lawyers and criminologists have been calling for the prison's closure for years, citing its age and reputation for violence.

A view of buildings at the Rikers Island penitentiary complex taken in 2011 

EMMANUEL DUNAND AFP

It is due to close by 2026 under a $8.7-billion proposal by de Blasio to replace it with four smaller facilities.

But he leaves office at the end of this year. Neither Perez, Martin nor Mayfield, all now justice reform campaigners, are confident it will shut. But they say it must.

"It's a cancer. It can't be fixed. It needs to be removed and cut out," said Mayfield, 59.

© 2021 AFP

A Good Reason Not To Vote For Harper

Harper, Bush Share Roots in Controversial Philosophy

What do close advisors to Stephen Harper and George W. Bush have in common? They reflect the disturbing teachings of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré who spawned the neoconservative movement.

Strauss, who died in 1973, believed in the inherent inequality of humanity. Most people, he famously taught, are too stupid to make informed decisions about their political affairs. Elite philosophers must decide on affairs of state for us.

In Washington, Straussians exert powerful influence from within the inner circle of the White House. In Canada, they roost, for now, in the so-called Calgary School, guiding Harper in framing his election strategies. What preoccupies Straussians in both places is the question of "regime change."

Strauss defined a regime as a set of governing ideas, institutions and traditions. The neoconservatives in the Bush administration, who secretly conspired to make the invasion of Iraq a certainty, had a precise plan for regime change. They weren't out to merely replace Saddam with an American puppet. They planned to make the system more like the U.S., with an electoral process that can be manipulated by the elites, corporate control over the levers of power and socially conservative values.

Elusive ‘einstein’ solves a long-standing math problem

An image provided by David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist who lives in Bridlington, England, of his ‘aperiodic monotile’ shape.

 [David Smith via The New York Times]

Siobhan Roberts

29.03.2023 • 03:10

Last November, after a decade of failed attempts, David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist of Bridlington in East Yorkshire, England, suspected that he might have finally solved an open problem in the mathematics of tiling: That is, he thought he might have discovered an “einstein.”

In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” – more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”) Your typical wallpaper or tiled floor is part of an infinite pattern that repeats periodically; when shifted, or “translated,” the pattern can be exactly superimposed on itself. An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.

“I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.

And now a new paper – by Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise – proves Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,” as it resembles a fedora. (Smith often sports a bandanna tied around his head.) The paper has not yet been peer reviewed.

“This appears to be a remarkable discovery!” Joshua Socolar, a physicist at Duke University who read an early copy of the paper provided by The New York Times, said in an email. “The most significant aspect for me is that the tiling does not clearly fall into any of the familiar classes of structures that we understand.”

“The mathematical result begs some interesting physics questions,” he added. “One could imagine encountering or fabricating a material with this type of internal structure.” Socolar and Joan Taylor, an independent researcher in Burnie, Tasmania, previously found a hexagonal monotile made of disconnected pieces, which according to some, stretched the rules. (They also found a connected 3D version of the Socolar-Taylor tile.)

From 20,426 to 1

Initially, mathematical tiling pursuits were motivated by a broad question: Was there a set of shapes that could tile the plane only nonperiodically? In 1961, mathematician Hao Wang conjectured that such sets were impossible, but his student Robert Berger soon proved the conjecture wrong. Berger discovered an aperiodic set of 20,426 tiles, and thereafter a set of 104.

Then the game became: How few tiles would do the trick? In the 1970s, Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at University of Oxford who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on black holes, got the number down to two.

Others have since hit upon shapes for two tiles. “I have a pair or two of my own,” said Chaim Goodman-Strauss, another of the paper’s authors, a professor at the University of Arkansas, who also holds the title of outreach mathematician at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York.

He noted that black and white squares also can make weird nonperiodic patterns, in addition to the familiar, periodic checkerboard pattern. “It’s really pretty trivial to be able to make weird and interesting patterns,” he said. The magic of the two Penrose tiles is that they make only nonperiodic patterns – that’s all they can do.

“But then the Holy Grail was, could you do with one – one tile?” Goodman-Strauss said.

As recently as a few years ago, Sir Roger was in pursuit of an einstein, but he set that exploration aside. “I got the number down to two, and now we have it down to one!” he said of the hat. “It’s a tour de force. I see no reason to disbelieve it.”

The paper provided two proofs, both executed by Joseph Myers, a co-author and a software developer in Cambridge, England. One was a traditional proof, based on a previous method, plus custom code; another deployed a new technique, not computer assisted, devised by Myers.

Sir Roger found the proofs “very complicated.” Nonetheless, he was “extremely intrigued” by the einstein, he said: “It’s a really good shape, strikingly simple.”

Imaginative tinkering

The simplicity came honestly. Smith’s investigations were mostly by hand; one of his co-authors described him as an “imaginative tinkerer.”

To begin, he would “fiddle about” on the computer screen with PolyForm Puzzle Solver, software developed by Jaap Scherphuis, a tiling enthusiast and puzzle theorist in Delft, the Netherlands. But if a shape had potential, Smith used a Silhouette cutting machine to produce a first batch of 32 copies from card stock. Then he would fit the tiles together, with no gaps or overlaps, like a jigsaw puzzle, reflecting and rotating tiles as necessary.

“It’s always nice to get hands-on,” Smith said. “It can be quite meditative. And it provides a better understanding of how a shape does or does not tessellate.”

When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.

“Could this shape be an answer to the so-called ‘einstein problem’ – now wouldn’t that be a thing?” Smith wrote.

“It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,” he said.

With this raw data, Smith and Kaplan studied the tiling’s hierarchical structure by eye. Kaplan detected and unlocked telltale behavior that opened up a traditional aperiodicity proof – the method mathematicians “pull out of the drawer anytime you have a candidate set of aperiodic tiles,” he said.

The first step, Kaplan said, was to “define a set of four ‘metatiles,’ simple shapes that stand in for small groupings of one, two, or four hats.” The metatiles assemble into four larger shapes that behave similarly. This assembly, from metatiles to supertiles to supersupertiles, ad infinitum, covered “larger and larger mathematical ‘floors’ with copies of the hat,” Kaplan said. “We then show that this sort of hierarchical assembly is essentially the only way to tile the plane with hats, which turns out to be enough to show that it can never tile periodically.”

“It’s very clever,” Berger, a retired electrical engineer in Lexington, Massachusetts, said in an interview. At the risk of seeming picky, he pointed out that because the hat tiling uses reflections – the hat-shaped tile and its mirror image – some might wonder whether this is a two-tile, not one-tile, set of aperiodic monotiles.

Goodman-Strauss had raised this subtlety on a tiling listserv: “Is there one hat or two?” The consensus was that a monotile counts as such even using its reflection. That leaves an open question, Berger said: Is there an einstein that will do the job without reflection?

Hiding in the hexagons

Kaplan clarified that “the hat” was not a new geometric invention. It is a polykite – it consists of eight kites. (Take a hexagon and draw three lines, connecting the center of each side to the center of its opposite side; the six shapes that result are kites.)

“It’s likely that others have contemplated this hat shape in the past, just not in a context where they proceeded to investigate its tiling properties,” Kaplan said. “I like to think that it was hiding in plain sight.”

Marjorie Senechal, a mathematician at Smith College, said, “In a certain sense, it has been sitting there all this time, waiting for somebody to find it.” Senechal’s research explores the neighboring realm of mathematical crystallography, and connections with quasicrystals.

“What blows my mind the most is that this aperiodic tiling is laid down on a hexagonal grid, which is about as periodic as you can possibly get,” said Doris Schattschneider, a mathematician at Moravian University, whose research focuses on the mathematical analysis of periodic tilings, especially those by Dutch artist M.C. Escher.

Senechal agreed. “It’s sitting right in the hexagons,” she said. “How many people are going to be kicking themselves around the world wondering, why didn’t I see that?”

The einstein family

Incredibly, Smith later found a second einstein. He called it “the turtle” – a polykite made of not eight kites but 10. It was “uncanny,” Kaplan said. He recalled feeling panicked; he was already “neck deep in the hat.”

But Myers, who had done similar computations, promptly discovered a profound connection between the hat and the turtle. And he discerned that, in fact, there was an entire family of related einsteins – a continuous, uncountable infinity of shapes that morph one to the next.

Smith wasn’t so impressed by some of the other family members. “They looked a bit like impostors, or mutants,” he said.

But this einstein family motivated the second proof, which offers a new tool for proving aperiodicity. The math seemed “too good to be true,” Myers said in an email. “I wasn’t expecting such a different approach to proving aperiodicity – but everything seemed to hold together as I wrote up the details.”

Goodman-Strauss views the new technique as a crucial aspect of the discovery; to date, there were only a handful of aperiodicity proofs. He conceded it was “strong cheese,” perhaps only for hard-core connoisseurs. It took him a couple of days to process. “Then I was thunderstruck,” he said.

Smith was amazed to see the research paper come together. “I was no help, to be honest.” He appreciated the illustrations, he said: “I’m more of a pictures person.”

This shape never existed before (and I'm mesmerised)

By Ian Dean

 published 3 days ago

What does it mean for design?

(Image credit: Smith et al. (2023)

Just when you think you've seen it all, mathematicians go and discover the existence of a new shape. That's right a new shape. The new 13-sided two-dimensional shape has been called the 'Hat' and could open up all manner of new design and graphic design challenges and ideas.

You may be asking what makes this 'new'? And why can't anyone just doodle a shape and call it a discovery? The difference between the Hat and any other shape you may draw is it can be used indefinitely in a pattern without ever repeating. This was previously only a theoretical shape, but now it's a reality.

So what does this mean for design and graphic design? Well, for one designers and artists have a new shape to play with, one that has never been used before. The circle is considered the most overused shape in graphic design, and can be found in everything from the Twitter logo to the Apple logo, so a new shape could spark ideas in the best graphic designers.


The Hat is a new 13-sided polykite shape that can be reused in a pattern without ever repeating (Image credit: Smith et al. (2023))

Here's a bit of maths detail: the new Hat shape is known as an aperiodic monotile, which is a maths way of saying a single tile can be used across an entire surface without ever repeating. Once just a theoretical shape, a 13-sided polykite shape made up of eight kites connected at their edges, was discovered by mathematician David Smith and his team when they published a research paper this month.


Co-author Chaim Goodman-Strauss, a mathematician at the National Museum of Mathematics, told the New Scientist(opens in new tab): "You’re literally looking for like a one in a million thing. You filter out the 999,999 of the boring ones, then you’ve got something that’s weird, and then that’s worth further exploration."

What's amazing is the team had to turn off their computers and work out the shape by hand and eye: "And then by hand you start examining them and try to understand them, and start to pull out the structure. That’s where a computer would be worthless as a human had to be involved in constructing a proof that a human could understand."

What will graphic designers do with this new shape? (Image credit: Smith et al. (2023))

The Hat isn't the most accessible shape for design, its angles and 13-sides could make it a tricky one to work into new logos and projects. But I find this new shape absolutely mesmerising. I can already imagine crafters being eager to break out the best laser cutters and Cricut machines and start creating abstract and geometric designs.

Interior designers may want to explore how the shape can be used in tiled floors, fabric patterns and designer wallpaper. But can the maths behind this new shape inform a generation of logo designers to explore a new trend in design? The discovery of an actual new shape, no matter how abstract, is exciting. And for once, it wasn't created by AI.

D.C. man fights to keep giant 'Transformers' statues outside his home

May 26 (UPI) -- A Washington, D.C., man is fighting to keep the giant Transformers statues outside his home -- and he's involved actors from the franchise in his efforts.

Newton Howard, a renowned brain scientist, commissioned an artist to create the massive statues of Autobots Bumblebee and Optimus Prime from old car parts in January 2021, and the installation of the two Transformers sculptures quickly received complaints from neighbors.

Howard's neighbors in Georgetown complained the statues don't match the neighborhoods aesthetic and represent a safety hazard due to drawing in a steady stream of visitors seeking photos with the Autobots.

The statues were a subject of discussion at the District's monthly Public Safety Committee meeting, which was held virtually on Thursday. Howard brought along actors Peter Cullen and Dan Gilvezan to speak in favor of the artworks. Cullen has voiced Optimus Prime in numerous animated and live-action Transformers projects, and Gilvezan voiced Bumblebee in the original 1984-87 Transformers animated series.

"I understand that some people think these statues don't fit the character of the neighborhood, that they stand out like a sore thumb," Gilvezan told the committee. "First I resent being compared to a sore thumb. A healthy well-functioning thumb -- maybe. But a sore thumb -- never."

The Public Safety Committee ruled in favor of the neighbors, saying the statues should be removed, but Howard said he will continue to fight to keep the Autobots in place. He said he is prepared to take the case to court.

D.C. Panel Calls On Man To Boot Down Giant Transformers On Sidewalk


Ben Blanchet

HUFFPOST
Fri, May 26, 2023 

Some Washington, D.C., residents aren’t fans of a pair of Transformers statues meeting their eyes in their Georgetown neighborhood. And they may get their wish after a D.C. panel called on the owner Thursday to remove the robots from the sidewalk.

Dr. Newton Howard, a billionaire neuroscientist at Georgetown University, owns the sculptures and placed them outside his home over two years ago. A statue of Optimus Prime overlooks the street below while Bumblebee and another Transformer greet visitors on the ground.

The statues have reportedly brought tourists, children and fans of the iconic franchise to the street, and several visitors who spoke to Washington’s News4 appeared to delight in their presence.

But complaints to several area groups show neighbors haven’t all enjoyed seeing the Transformers roll out onto their block.

“It is clear that ‘transformer robot’ structures sitting on planters are clearly inconsistent with the goal to preserve the historic nature of Georgetown,” read a 2021 letter from six of Howard’s neighbors, according to WUSA9.

“We are not naive and understand why people stop and look at the ‘Transformers.’ They need to be, however, in a location suitable to safe vehicular and pedestrian traffic and where residents will not share an unnecessary burden by their presence,” wrote Catherine Emmerson on behalf of a citizens’ group on the Georgetown street in March of this year.

The complaints were enough to spark D.C.’s Public Space Committee, a government body that decides on the use of public space for matters like sidewalk cafes, to decide Thursday that the bots should be removed from the sidewalk, WUSA9 reported.

A separate, three-person federal board ― which reportedly approved the statues’ six-month installment back in 2021 ― called last month for Howard to remove the bots.

Workers stop to admire and photograph Bumblebee outside the entrance of Howard's home in the Georgetown neighborhood in 2021.

Workers stop to admire and photograph Bumblebee outside the entrance of Howard's home in the Georgetown neighborhood in 2021.

D.C. Shadow Sen. Paul Strauss, an attorney representing Howard, argued at the Thursday meeting that the bots don’t “endanger” the public, according to DCist/WAMU.

“The allegations that they are contributing to a traffic or dangerous activity is just laughable,” he said.

Peter Cullen and Dan Gilvezan ― voice actors of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, respectively, in the original “Transformers” series ― also joined the meeting to back Howard’s pleas to keep the statues put.

“Now, I understand some people think that these statues don’t fit the character of the neighborhood, that they stand out like a sore thumb. Well, first, I resent being compared to a sore thumb,” Gilvezan said. “A healthy, well-functioning thumb, maybe, but a sore thumb?”

“The Mandalorian” star Emily Swallow, who was born in D.C. and plays The Armorer in the “Star Wars” series, also testified in support of Howard.


Strauss, in an interview with DCist/WAMU, responded to the committee’s decision and assured that the fight for the Autobots is “not over yet.”

“Obviously there’s a variety of legal options but we want to get a better sense of whether reapplying with certain modifications may make some sense,” he said.

“At the end of the day, this should be a decision made by D.C. residents, not federal appointees,” Strauss added. “Dr. Howard’s front porch does not involve a federal interest.”

More than meets the eye: Georgetown vs. giant Transformers statues

A brain scientist vows to fight to keep Optimus Prime and Bumblebee outside his home after a board says they have to go

April 8, 2023

Newton Howard stands outside his home with two Transformer statues. 

(Courtesy of Newton Howard )

If you’ve ever played with a Transformers toy, you know it starts out in one form and turns into another. Robots take shape from trucks, jets and dinosaurs.

To hear Newton Howard tell it, that concept of transformation, of humans and machines creating new possibilities together, is what compelled him to commission two giant Transformers statues and place them in front of his Georgetown home.

It’s also why, he said, he plans to fight to keep them there.

“We are transformers. We change things as humans,” said Howard, a brain and cognitive scientist who teaches at Georgetown University and whose work involves using technology to try to cure neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. He said the idea that people hold the power to transform the things around them contains “extraordinary value,” especially for children, and children often come to see the statues.

‘Bumblebee! Bumblebee!’: A 4-year-old got an epic surprise, and the strangers who gave it to him got something, too

Since putting the towering figures outside his rowhouse about two years ago, the father of four has seen children stop and marvel at the car parts within them, pose for photos alongside them and even leave flowers for them.

He has also seen grown-ups complain that the statues don’t fit in with the aesthetics of the historic block of multimillion-dollar homes, could be a safety hazard and draw people to the street in disruptive ways.

The statues depict Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. In the cartoon series and movies, those two characters are heroes. They fight to save humanity. But in Georgetown, in recent days, this was made clear: Some humans want them gone.

The Old Georgetown Board, a panel of architects that reviews projects in the historic district, voted unanimously Thursday to deny Howard’s request to keep the statues standing outside his home.

Howard said he learned about the vote only when he started receiving messages from friends who saw media coverage about the decision. An article in DCist quotes board Chair H. Alan Brangman as saying, “We hope that these statues will disappear in the not-too-distant future.”

Neighbors annoyed with one another’s outdoor decorating decisions are nothing new. Many of us can think of displays our neighbors have put outside that we would have preferred they kept inside. But when it comes to the conflict surrounding the giant Transformers, as the famous catchphrase for the franchise goes, there is “more than meets the eye.” The issue goes beyond aesthetics and artistic taste.

The Old Georgetown Board’s decision is just the latest development in a conflict in which lawyers have been hired, paperwork has been filed, and questions have been raised about historic preservation and personal freedom.

Before I go on, I should admit that I am a fan of Transformers. My older son has been obsessed with the toys and cartoons since he was a toddler, and I have grown to appreciate them through him. But even if I couldn’t rattle off the names of a dozen characters, I would sill think that Optimus Prime and Bumblebee should be allowed to remain standing in Georgetown. To quote Optimus Prime: “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.”

If what people choose to display outside their home is not offensive, dangerous or blocking access to the sidewalk, they shouldn’t be forced to dismantle it. And Howard’s display is none of those things. The statues stand on platforms that once held flowerpots and, he said, he hired an engineering firm to secure the statues in place and pays two security services to monitor them around-the-clock. If someone tries to climb on either of the statues, a real person will issue a warning through a speaker to stop.

Optimus Prime and Bumblebee don’t pose a public threat. That’s one reason they should be allowed to remain standing. Another: They bring joy to people.

In the days since the board’s decision, Howard has received messages from strangers expressing support for him and the robots. He shared some with me. They have come from parents, local business owners and Georgetown residents who don’t want to see the robots removed. In one message, a cancer survivor described purposely making an effort to pass the Transformers on the way home, “because they make me happy and I smile every time I walk by.”

“I have received so many beautiful messages,” Howard said. He described them as countering the “disappointing” words of his neighbors, which he characterized as aimed at keeping people out of the neighborhood. “The people that want this to be removed are people that are showing no grace, no openness, no inclusion, no invitation to others. It’s an awful message. It’s contrary to what I believe.”

The Old Georgetown Board had previously denied his request for the statues, but after Howard secured them to his home, he sent another request. Howard said the matter now will be considered by the Public Space Committee at a hearing that is scheduled for April 27. If the statues are ultimately ordered removed, he plans to take legal action, he said.

“I already called my lawyer and said, ‘Do whatever it takes,’” Howard said. He said he has spent nearly $100,000 fighting the issue and, while he doesn’t want to lose thousands more to it, he is prepared to. “It’s even worse if I’m able to spend that money and I don’t spend it and allow somebody to win with a message of bigotry: You are not welcome in my

SPACE NEWS

Image from NASA's James Webb Telescope shows supernova in greater detail

NASA’s powerful James Webb Telescope has returned a new image of exploding supernova star Cassiopeia A, giving scientists never-before-seen detail, the agency said Friday. 

Photo courtesy of NASA

April 7 (UPI) -- NASA's powerful James Webb Telescope has returned a new image of an exploding supernova star, giving scientists never-before-seen details, the space agency confirmed Friday.

The detailed photo provides greater insight into the Cassiopeia A supernova, which exploded 340 years ago, the youngest known remnant from such an explosion in our Milky Way Galaxy, NASA said in a statement.

The image, itself, comes from the telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument, which provides greater detail than previous infrared imaging. That image is then translated into visible-light wavelengths.

The $10 billion telescope launched on Christmas Day in 2021. It has been sending back images since, giving astronomers "unprecedented views" of our own galaxy and beyond.

Friday's news gives researchers a more in-depth look at a prototypical supernova remnant after an explosion. Cassiopeia A already has been studied extensively by both ground and space-based observatories, including NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory, which was launched into space in 1999.

"​​Cas A represents our best opportunity to look at the debris field of an exploded star and run a kind of stellar autopsy to understand what type of star was there beforehand and how that star exploded," Purdue University researcher Danny Milisavljevic, principal investigator of the Webb program that captured the observations, said in a statement

"Compared to previous infrared images, we see incredible detail that we haven't been able to access before," said Princeton University scientist and co-investigator Tea Temim.

Webb reveals never-before-seen details in Cassiopeia A

Reports and Proceedings

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

 

IMAGE: CASSIOPEIA A (CAS A) IS A SUPERNOVA REMNANT LOCATED ABOUT 11,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH IN THE CONSTELLATION CASSIOPEIA. IT SPANS APPROXIMATELY 10 LIGHT-YEARS. THIS NEW IMAGE USES DATA FROM WEBB’S MID-INFRARED INSTRUMENT (MIRI) TO REVEAL CAS A IN A NEW LIGHT. view more 

CREDIT: CREDITS: NASA, ESA, CSA, D. D. MILISAVLJEVIC (PURDUE), T. TEMIM (PRINCETON), I. DE LOOZE (GHENT UNIVERSITY). IMAGE PROCESSING: J. DEPASQUALE (STSCI).

The explosion of a star is a dramatic event, but the remains the star leaves behind can be even more dramatic. A new mid-infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provides one stunning example. It shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), created by a stellar explosion seen from Earth 340 years ago. Cas A is the youngest known remnant from an exploding, massive star in our galaxy, which makes it a unique opportunity to learn more about how such supernovae occur.

 

“Cas A represents our best opportunity to look at the debris field of an exploded star and run a kind of stellar autopsy to understand what type of star was there beforehand and how that star exploded,” said Danny Milisavljevic of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, principal investigator of the Webb program that captured these observations.

 

“Compared to previous infrared images, we see incredible detail that we haven't been able to access before,” added Tea Temim of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, a co-investigator on the program.

 

Cassiopeia A is a prototypical supernova remnant that has been widely studied by a number of ground-based and space-based observatories, including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The multi-wavelength observations can be combined to provide scientists with a more comprehensive understanding of the remnant.

Dissecting the Image

 

The striking colors of the new Cas A image, in which infrared light is translated into visible-light wavelengths, hold a wealth of scientific information the team is just beginning to tease out. On the bubble’s exterior, particularly at the top and left, lie curtains of material appearing orange and red due to emission from warm dust. This marks where ejected material from the exploded star is ramming into surrounding circumstellar gas and dust.

 

Interior to this outer shell lie mottled filaments of bright pink studded with clumps and knots. This represents material from the star itself, which is shining due to a mix of various heavy elements, such as oxygen, argon, and neon, as well as dust emission.

 

“We’re still trying to disentangle all these sources of emission,” said Ilse De Looze of Ghent University in Belgium, another co-investigator on the program.

 

The stellar material can also be seen as fainter wisps near the cavity’s interior.

 

Perhaps most prominently, a loop represented in green extends across the right side of the central cavity. “We’ve nicknamed it the Green Monster in honor of Fenway Park in Boston. If you look closely, you’ll notice that it’s pockmarked with what look like mini-bubbles,” said Milisavljevic. “The shape and complexity are unexpected and challenging to understand.”

 

Origins of Cosmic Dust – and Us

 

Among the science questions that Cas A may help answer is: Where does cosmic dust come from? Observations have found that even very young galaxies in the early universe are suffused with massive quantities of dust. It’s difficult to explain the origins of this dust without invoking supernovae, which spew large quantities of heavy elements (the building blocks of dust) across space.

 

However, existing observations of supernovae have been unable to conclusively explain the amount of dust we see in those early galaxies. By studying Cas A with Webb, astronomers hope to gain a better understanding of its dust content, which can help inform our understanding of where the building blocks of planets and ourselves are created.

 

“In Cas A, we can spatially resolve regions that have different gas compositions and look at what types of dust were formed in those regions,” explained Temim.

 

Supernovae like the one that formed Cas A are crucial for life as we know it. They spread elements like the calcium we find in our bones and the iron in our blood across interstellar space, seeding new generations of stars and planets.

 

“By understanding the process of exploding stars, we’re reading our own origin story,” said Milisavljevic. “I’m going to spend the rest of my career trying to understand what’s in this data set.”

 

The Cas A remnant spans about 10 light-years and is located 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia.

 

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

NEWS RELEASE 6-APR-2023

Twinkling stars fuel interstellar dust

Stars with variable luminosity found to influence supply of dust that made life

UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

 

IMAGE: ARTIST’S IMPRESSION OF HOW ASYMPTOTIC GIANT BRANCH STARS EXERT PRESSURE ON SOLID MATTER. view more 

CREDIT: ©2023 MIYATA, TACHIBANA, ET AL. CC-BY

Of the many different kinds of stars, asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, usually slightly larger and older than our own sun, are known producers of interstellar dust. Dusty AGBs are particularly prominent producers of dust, and the light they shine happens to vary widely. For the first time, a long-period survey has found the variable intensity of dusty AGBs coincides with variations in the amount of dust these stars produce. As this dust can lead to the creation of planets, its study can shed light on our own origins.

You’ve probably heard of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which has been in the news lately. It’s famous for being the largest and most sensitive space telescope designed to observe infrared (IR) light. But long before the JWST took to the skies, two other IR space telescopes, AKARI and WISE, have been surveying the cosmos, both of which have ended their initial missions, but produced so much valuable data that astronomers are still finding new discoveries with it. The latest finding from that data by doctoral student Kengo Tachibana from the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Astronomy and his team, could have implications for the study of the origins of life itself.

“We study stars, and IR light from them is a key source of information that helps us unlock their secrets,” said Tachibana. “Until recently, most IR data was from very short-period surveys due to the lack of advanced dedicated platforms. But missions like AKARI and WISE have allowed us to take longer-period surveys of things. This means we can see how things might change over greater time periods, and what these changes might imply. Lately, we turned our attention to a certain class of star known as asymptotic giant branch stars, which are interesting because they are the main producers of interstellar dust.”

This interstellar dust is not the same stuff that accumulates on your floor when you forget to vacuum for a few days; it’s a name given to heavy elements that disperse from stars and lead to the formation of solid objects including planets. Although it’s long been known that AGBs, and especially so-called dusty AGBs, are the main producers of dust, it’s not known what the main drivers of dust production are and where we should be looking to find this out.

“Our latest study has pointed us in the right direction,” said Tachibana. “Thanks to long-period IR observations, we have found that the light from dusty AGBs varies with periods longer than several hundred days. We also found that the spherical shells of dust produced by and then ejected by these stars have concentrations of dust that vary in step with the stars’ changes in luminosity. Of the 169 dusty AGBs surveyed, no matter their variability period, the concentrations of dust around them would coincide. So, we’re certain these are connected.”

Finding a connection between the concentration of dust and the variability of stars’ brightness is just the first step in this investigation however. Now the team wishes to explore the possible physical mechanisms behind the production of dust. For this, they intend to monitor various AGB stars for many years continuously. The University of Tokyo is nearing completion of a large ground-based telescope project, the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory, in Chile, which will be dedicated to making infrared observations.

Artist’s impression of an asymptotic giant branch star.

CREDIT

©2023 Miyata, Tachibana, et al. CC-BY

Journal article

Kengo TACHIBANA, Takashi MIYATA, Takafumi KAMIZUKA, Ryou OHSAWA, Satoshi TAKITA, Akiharu NAKAGAWA, Yoshifusa ITA and Mizuho UCHIYAMA, “Investigation of mid-infrared long-term variability of dusty AGB stars using multiepoch scan data of AKARI and WISE”, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, DOI

 

Funding
This work was supported by JST SPRING, Grant Number JPMJSP2108.

About the University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo is Japan's leading university and one of the world's top research universities. The vast research output of some 6,000 researchers is published in the world's top journals across the arts and sciences. Our vibrant student body of around 15,000 undergraduate and 15,000 graduate students includes over 4,000 international students. Find out more at www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ or follow us on Twitter at @UTokyo_News_en.

---

JOURNAL

Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Investigation of mid-infrared long-term variability of dusty AGB stars using multiepoch scan data of AKARI and WISE

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Apr-2023

How to see the invisible: Using the dark matter distribution to test our cosmological model

A Princeton-led team of astrophysicists has measured a value for the “clumpiness” of the universe’s dark matter that suggests the standard cosmological model might need to be revised

Reports and Proceedings

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: PRINCETON ASTROPHYSICISTS MICHAEL STRAUSS AND ROOHI DALAL ARE PART OF AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM THAT TESTED THE STANDARD COSMOLOGICAL MODEL BY MEASURING LENSING AROUND PATCHES OF DARK MATTER. STRAUSS IS CHAIR OF PRINCETON’S DEPARTMENT OF ASTROPHYSICAL SCIENCES AND ONE OF THE LEADERS OF THE HYPER-SUPRIME CAMERA TEAM ON THE SUBARU TELESCOPE, AND DALAL IS A GRADUATE STUDENT ON HIS TEAM WHO IS FIRST AUTHOR ON ONE OF A SERIES OF NEW PAPERS FROM THE HSC TEAM. view more 

CREDIT: STEPHANIE N. REIF, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

It feels like a classical paradox: How do you see the invisible? But for modern astronomers, it is a very real challenge: How do you measure dark matter, which by definition emits no light?

The answer: You see how it impacts things that you can see. In the case of dark matter, astronomers watch how light from distant galaxies bends around it.

An international team of astrophysicists and cosmologists have spent the past year teasing out the secrets of this elusive material, using sophisticated computer simulations and the observations from the one of the most powerful astronomical cameras in the world, the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC). The team is led by astronomers from Princeton University and the astronomical communities of Japan and Taiwan, using data from the first three years of the HSC sky survey, a wide-field imaging survey carried out with the 8.2-meter Subaru telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawai’i. Subaru is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; its name is the Japanese word for the cluster of stars we call the Pleiades.

The team presented their findings at a webinar attended by more than 200 people, and they will share their work at the "Future Science with CMB x LSS" conference in Japan.

“Our overall goal is to measure some of the most fundamental properties of our universe,” said Roohi Dalal, a graduate student in astrophysics at Princeton. “We know that dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of our universe, but we understand very little about what they actually are and how they’ve evolved over the history of the universe. Clumps of dark matter distort the light of distant galaxies through weak gravitational lensing, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. This distortion is a really, really small effect; the shape of a single galaxy is distorted by an imperceptible amount. But when we make that measurement for 25 million galaxies, we’re able to measure the distortion with quite high precision.”

To jump to the punchline: The team has measured a value for the “clumpiness” of the universe’s dark matter (known to cosmologists as “S8”) of 0.776, which aligns with values that other gravitational lensing surveys have found in looking at the relatively recent universe — but it does not align with the value of 0.83 derived from the Cosmic Microwave Background, which dates back to the universe’s origins.

The gap between these two values is small, but as more and more studies confirm each of the two values, it doesn’t appear to be accidental. The other possibilities are that there’s some as-yet unrecognized error or mistake in one of these two measurements or the standard cosmological model is incomplete in some interesting way. 

“We’re still being fairly cautious here,” said Michael Strauss, chair of Princeton’s Department of Astrophysical Sciences and one of the leaders of the HSC team. “We’re not saying that we’ve just discovered that modern cosmology is all wrong, because, as Roohi has emphasized, the effect that we’re measuring is a very subtle one. Now, we think we’ve done the measurement right. And the statistics show that there’s only a one in 20 chance that it’s just due to chance, which is compelling but not completely definitive. But as we in the astronomy community come to the same conclusion over multiple experiments, as we keep on doing these measurements, perhaps we’re finding that it’s real.”

This cluster of stars, known as the Pleiades to Western astronomers, is known as Subaru in Japan and gives its name to the 8.2-meter Subaru telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawai’i. Subaru is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

CREDIT

NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory

Hiding and uncovering the data

The idea that some change is needed in the standard cosmological model, that there is some fundamental piece of cosmology yet to be discovered, is a deliciously enticing one for some scientists. 

“We are human beings, and we do have preferences. That’s why we do what we call a ‘blinded’ analysis,” Strauss said. “Scientists have become self-aware enough to know that we will bias ourselves, no matter how careful we are, unless we carry out our analysis without allowing ourselves to know the results until the end. For me, I would love to really find something fundamentally new. That would be truly exciting. But because I am prejudiced in that direction, we want to be very careful not to let that influence any analysis that we do.”

To protect their work from their biases, they quite literally hid their results from themselves and their colleagues — month after month after month.

“I worked on this analysis for a year and didn’t get to see the values that were coming out,” said Dalal. 

The team even added an extra obfuscating layer: they ran their analyses on three different galaxy catalogs, one real and two with numerical values offset by random values. 

“We didn’t know which of them was real, so even if someone did accidentally see the values, we wouldn’t know if the results were based on the real catalog or not,” she said.

On February 16, the international team gathered together on Zoom — in the evening in Princeton, in the morning in Japan and Taiwan — for the “unblinding.” 

“It felt like a ceremony, a ritual, that we went through,” Strauss said. “We unveiled the data, and ran our plots, immediately we saw it was great. Everyone went, ‘Oh, whew!’ and everyone was very happy.”

Dalal and her roommate popped a bottle of champagne that night.

A huge survey with the world’s largest telescope camera

HSC is the largest camera on a telescope of its size in the world, a mantle it will hold until the Vera C. Rubin Observatory currently under construction in the Chilean Andes, begins the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) in late 2024. In fact, the raw data from HSC is processed with the software designed for LSST. “It is fascinating to see that our software pipelines are able to handle such large quantities of data well ahead of LSST,” said Andrés Plazas, an associate research scholar at Princeton.

The survey that the research team used covers about 420 square degrees of the sky, about the equivalent of 2000 full moons. It’s not a single contiguous chunk of sky, but split among six different pieces, each about the size that you could cover with an outstretched fist. The 25 million galaxies they surveyed are so distant that instead of seeing these galaxies as they are today, the HSC recorded how they were billions of years ago. 

Each of these galaxies glows with the fires of tens of billions of suns, but because they are so far away, they are extremely faint, as much as 25 million times fainter than the faintest stars we can see with the naked eye. 

“It is extremely exciting to see these results from HSC collaboration, especially as this data is closest to what we expect from Rubin Observatory, which the community is working towards together,” said cosmologist Alexandra Amon, a Senior Kavli Fellow at Cambridge University and a senior researcher at Trinity College, who was not involved in this research. “Their deep survey makes for beautiful data. For me, it is intriguing that HSC, like the other independent weak lensing surveys, point to a low value for S8 — it’s important validation, and exciting that these tensions and trends force us to pause and think about what that data is telling us about our Universe!”

The standard cosmological model

The standard model of cosmology is “astonishingly simple” in some ways, explained Andrina Nicola of the University of Bonn, who advised Dalal on this project when she was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton. The model posits that the universe is made up of only four basic constituents: ordinary matter (atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium), dark matter, dark energy and photons. 

According to the standard model, the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago: it started out almost perfectly smooth, but the pull of gravity on the subtle fluctuations in the universe has caused structure — galaxies enveloped in dark matter clumps — to form. In the present-day universe, the relative contributions of ordinary matter, dark matter, dark energy are about 5%, 25% and 70%, plus a tiny contribution from photons. 

The standard model is defined by only a handful of numbers: the expansion rate of the universe; a measure of how clumpy the dark matter is (S8); the relative contributions of the constituents of the universe (the 5%, 25%, 70% numbers above); the overall density of the universe; and a technical quantity describing how the clumpiness of the universe on large scales relates to that on small scales. 

“And that’s basically it!” Strauss said. “We, the cosmological community, have converged on this model, which has been in place since the early 2000s.” 

Cosmologists are eager to test this model by constraining these numbers in various ways, such as by observing the fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (which in essence is the universe’s baby picture, capturing how it looked after its first 400,000 years), modeling the expansion history of the universe, measuring the clumpiness of the universe in the relatively recent past, and others.

“We’re confirming a growing sense in the community that there is a real discrepancy between the measurement of clumping in the early universe (measured from the CMB) and that from the era of galaxies, ‘only’ 9 billion years ago,” said Arun Kannawadi, an associate research scholar at Princeton who was involved in the analysis. 

Five lines of attack

Dalal’s work does a so-called Fourier-space analysis; a parallel real-space analysis was led by Xiangchong Li of Carnegie Mellon University, who worked in close collaboration with Rachel Mandelbaum, who completed her physics A.B. in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2006, both from Princeton. A third analysis, a so-called 3x2-point analysis, takes a different approach of measuring the gravitational lensing signal around individual galaxies, to calibrate the amount of dark matter associated with each galaxy. That analysis was led by Sunao Sugiyama of the University of Tokyo, Hironao Miyatake (a former Princeton postdoctoral fellow) of Nagoya University and Surhud More of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.

These five sets of analyses each use the HSC data to come to the same conclusion about S8. 

Doing both the real-space analysis and the Fourier-space analysis “was sort of a sanity check,” said Dalal. She and Li worked closely to coordinate their analyses, using blinded data. Any discrepancies between those two would say that the researchers’ methodology was wrong. “It would tell us less about astrophysics and more about how we might have screwed up,” Dalal said. 

“We didn’t know until the unblinding that two results were bang-on identical,” she said. “It felt miraculous.”

Sunao added: “Our 3x2-point analysis combines the weak lensing analysis with the clustering of galaxies. Only after unblinding did we know that our results were in beautiful agreement with those of Roohi and Xiangchong. The fact that all these analyses are giving the same answer gives us confidence that we’re doing something right!”

Learn more at https://hsc-release.mtk.nao.ac.jp/doc/index.php/. This research will be presented at "Future Science with CMB x LSS," a conference running from April 10-14 at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (DGE-2039656); the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe; the University of Tokyo; the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK); the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan; Princeton University; the FIRST program from the Japanese Cabinet Office; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT); the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; the Japan Science and Technology Agency; the Toray Science Foundation; and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

NASA’s high-resolution air quality control instrument launches

Business Announcement

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

 

IMAGE: NASA’S TROPOSPHERIC EMISSIONS: MONITORING OF POLLUTION (TEMPO) INSTRUMENT LAUNCHED 12:30 A.M. EDT FRIDAY, APRIL 7 AS A PAYLOAD ON INTELSAT 40E ABOARD A SPACEX FALCON 9 ROCKET FROM CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION IN FLORIDA. view more 

CREDIT: CREDITS: NASA

A NASA instrument to provide unprecedented resolution of monitoring major air pollutants – down to four square miles – lifted off on its way to geostationary orbit at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality from space.

"The TEMPO mission is about more than just studying pollution – it's about improving life on Earth for all. By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will help improve air quality across North America and protect our planet,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

 

NASA’s TEMPO launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The instrument is a payload on the satellite Intelsat 40E, which separated from the rocket approximately 32 minutes after launch. Signal acquisition occurred at 1:14 a.m. TEMPO commissioning activities will begin in late May or early June.

 

From a fixed geostationary orbit above the equator, TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to measure air quality over North America hourly during the daytime and at spatial regions of several square miles – far better than existing limits of about 100 square miles in the U.S. TEMPO data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution, including studies of rush hour pollution, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, and even the effects of fertilizer application.  

 

“NASA makes data from instruments like TEMPO easily accessible to everyone,” said Karen St. Germain, division director for NASA’s Earth Sciences Division. “Which means that everyone from community and industry leaders to asthma sufferers are going to be able to access air quality information at a higher level of detail – in both time and location - than they’ve ever been able to before. And that also provides the information needed to start addressing one of the most pressing human health challenges.”

TEMPO’s observations will dramatically improve the scientific data record on air pollution – including ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde – not only over the continental United States, but also Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and part of the island of Hispaniola. 

 

"Our TEMPO slogan is 'It's about time,' which hints at TEMPO's ability to provide hourly air pollution data," said Xiong Liu, deputy principal investigator for TEMPO at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "After working on the TEMPO for more than 10 years, it is about time to launch TEMPO to produce real TEMPO data and start the new era of air quality monitoring over North America."

 

From its geostationary orbit – a high Earth orbit that allows satellites to match Earth's rotation – TEMPO also will form part of an air quality satellite virtual constellation that will track pollution around the Northern Hemisphere. South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, the first instrument in the constellation, launched into space in 2020 on the Korean Aerospace Research Institute GEO-KOMPSAT-2B satellite, and is measuring pollution over Asia. The ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-4 satellite, scheduled to launch in 2024, will make measurements over Europe and North Africa.

 

“This marks a new era in our ability to observe air pollution over North America, including the entire continental United States,” said Barry Lefer, TEMPO program scientist and tropospheric composition program manager for NASA. “It’s also opening the door for us to work more closely with our international partners to better understand global air quality and its transport.”

 

The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace and integrated onto Intelsat 40E by Maxar.

 

To learn more about NASA’s Earth sciences, visit:

 

https://www.nasa.gov/earth

Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

 

IMAGE: THIS IS AN ARTIST'S IMPRESSION OF A RUNAWAY SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE THAT WAS EJECTED FROM ITS HOST GALAXY AS A RESULT OF A TUSSLE BETWEEN IT AND TWO OTHER BLACK HOLES. AS THE BLACK HOLE PLOWS THROUGH INTERGALACTIC SPACE IT COMPRESSES TENUOUS GAS IN FRONT TO IT. THIS PRECIPITATES THE BIRTH OF HOT BLUE STARS. THIS ILLUSTRATION IS BASED ON HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF A 200,000-LIGHT-YEAR-LONG "CONTRAIL" OF STARS BEHIND AN ESCAPING BLACK HOLE. view more 

CREDIT: NASA, ESA, LEAH HUSTAK (STSCI)

There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."

Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion.

When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view of the universe with Hubble's exquisite resolution. As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable "star streaks" elsewhere in the universe. This may require machine learning using algorithms that are very good at finding specific weird shapes in a sea of other astronomical data, according to van Dokkum.

The research paper will be published on April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

RUNAWAY BLACK HOLE NEAR RCP28

 NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

This Hubble Space Telescope archival photo captures a curious linear feature that is so unusual it was first dismissed as an imaging artifact from Hubble's cameras. But follow-up spectroscopic observations reveal it is a 200,000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars. A supermassive black hole lies at the tip of the bridge at lower left. The black hole was ejected from the galaxy at upper right. It compressed gas in its wake to leave a long trail of young blue stars. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the universe. This unusual event happened when the universe was approximately half its current age.

CREDIT

NASA, ESA, Pieter van Dokkum (Yale); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

---

JOURNAL

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI

10.3847/2041-8213/acba86 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

A Candidate Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Identified by Shocks and Star Formation in its Wake

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Apr-2023

NASA’s Webb scores another ringed world with new image of Uranus

Reports and Proceedings

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

 

IMAGE: THIS ZOOMED-IN IMAGE OF URANUS, CAPTURED BY WEBB’S NEAR-INFRARED CAMERA (NIRCAM) FEB. 6, 2023, REVEALS STUNNING VIEWS OF THE PLANET’S RINGS. THE PLANET DISPLAYS A BLUE HUE IN THIS REPRESENTATIVE-COLOR IMAGE, MADE BY COMBINING DATA FROM TWO FILTERS (F140M, F300M) AT 1.4 AND 3.0 MICRONS, WHICH ARE SHOWN HERE AS BLUE AND ORANGE, RESPECTIVELY. DOWNLOAD THE FULL-RESOLUTION VERSION FROM THE SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE. view more 

CREDIT: CREDITS: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI. IMAGE PROCESSING: J. DEPASQUALE (STSCI)

Following in the footsteps of the Neptune image released in 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of the solar system’s other ice giant, the planet Uranus. The new image features dramatic rings as well as bright features in the planet’s atmosphere. The Webb data demonstrates the observatory’s unprecedented sensitivity for the faintest dusty rings, which have only ever been imaged by two other facilities: the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986, and the Keck Observatory with advanced adaptive optics.

 

The seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus is unique: It rotates on its side, at roughly a 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. This causes extreme seasons since the planet’s poles experience many years of constant sunlight followed by an equal number of years of complete darkness. (Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun.) Currently, it is late spring for the northern pole, which is visible here; Uranus’ northern summer will be in 2028. In contrast, when Voyager 2 visited Uranus it was summer at the south pole. The south pole is now on the ‘dark side’ of the planet, out of view and facing the darkness of space.

 

This infrared image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) combines data from two filters at 1.4 and 3.0 microns, which are shown here in blue and orange, respectively. The planet displays a blue hue in the resulting representative-color image.

 

When Voyager 2 looked at Uranus, its camera showed an almost featureless blue-green ball in visible wavelengths. With the infrared wavelengths and extra sensitivity of Webb we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is.

 

On the right side of the planet there’s an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus – it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanish in the fall; these Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb’s NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory.

At the edge of the polar cap lies a bright cloud as well as a few fainter extended features just beyond the cap’s edge, and a second very bright cloud is seen at the planet’s left limb. Such clouds are typical for Uranus in infrared wavelengths, and likely are connected to storm activity.

 

This planet is characterized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. Most of its mass is thought to be a hot, dense fluid of "icy" materials – water, methane, and ammonia – above a small rocky core.

 

Uranus has 13 known rings and 11 of them are visible in this Webb image. Some of these rings are so bright with Webb that when they are close together, they appear to merge into a larger ring. Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings (such as the diffuse zeta ring closest to the planet) that weren’t discovered until the 1986 flyby by Voyager 2. Scientists expect that future Webb images of Uranus will reveal the two faint outer rings that were discovered with Hubble during the 2007 ring-plane crossing.

 

Webb also captured many of Uranus’ 27 known moons (most of which are too small and faint to be seen here); the six brightest are identified in the wide-view image. This was only a short, 12-minute exposure image of Uranus with just two filters. It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet. In 2022, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identified Uranus science as a priority in its 2023-2033 Planetary Science and Astrobiology decadal survey. Additional studies of Uranus are happening now, and more are planned in Webb’s first year of science operations.

 

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

This wider view of the Uranian system with Webb’s NIRCam instrument features the planet Uranus as well as six of its 27 known moons (most of which are too small and faint to be seen in this short exposure). A handful of background objects, including many galaxies, are also seen.

CREDIT

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)

New book explores possibilities of colonizing planets, moons and beyond

New Worlds: Colonizing Planets, Moons and Beyond

Book Announcement

BENTHAM SCIENCE PUBLISHERS

Dan Răzvan Popoviciu new book New Worlds: Colonizing Planets, Moons and Beyond (published by Bentham Science) explores the possibilities of transforming humanity into a multi-planetary species, while also sounding an alarm about our long-term future. It emphasizes the importance of efficiently using Earth's resources and expanding beyond the planet's borders.

In the book, Popoviciu discusses how various planets, moons, and asteroids in the Solar System can provide important resources and become potential new home worlds for humans. The author goes beyond simple colonization and discusses solutions for terraforming these worlds, making them habitable for human descendants. He suggests that the technological solutions needed for terraforming are within reach and can be accomplished with the necessary willpower.

He also highlights the importance of researching the working mechanisms of the Universe, which is crucial for accessing other planetary systems. The book concludes by emphasizing the need for a synergistic approach to settling the Cosmos, using all available methods simultaneously to lower costs and the necessary time.

 

With ten captivating chapters, the book delves into the economic and demographic reasons driving the push for space exploration and settlement and exciting technical and ecological solutions that can improve life on Earth. This book covers everything from terraforming Mars and other planets like Venus to colonizing the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond. The author also dives into ethical considerations that support the expansion of humanity beyond our planet.  New Worlds: Colonizing Planets, Moons and Beyond is an informative and essential read for anyone fascinated by the idea of space exploration and colonization.